I am at level 32. I played successfully as a melee fighter/summoner combo. The hours leading up to the final battle were an absolute cakewalk considering how difficult some of the game was. Yet with so many points spent on health leech and health regen, I had gotten to the point where I was barely taking damage, and often was taking none--even in the arena fight in which you re-fight all the bosses that had come before.
The final battle, then, has come as a surprise. I have at last eliminated every non-boss character in the battle, leaving only the two bosses. However, because they self-heal, it is literally impossible to complete. They regain health faster than I can damage them, so at the end of the game--in an area that I cannot leave to go and finish up the few side quests I had left--I am stuck in a stalemate.
I can forgive bugs, in the sense that they are accidents. They are not purposeful design failures, but flaws that appear in many a game, particularly ambitious ones like RPGs. But I can't forgive purposeful design decisions that force the player to revert to an old save game and lose hours of progress due to conscious design decisions. Divinity 2 has some excellent qualities, and it's easy to like in spite of its many, many flaws. But the last several hours of the game are a failure of game design. You have a responsibility to make your game communicate properly to the player. By making the linear path leading to this encounter so incredibly, mouse-button-mashingly easy, you communicate to the player that he or she is in a position to follow the path to its conclusion. This is game design 101--and it is one of many reasons why superb games like Dragon Age capture our fancy, while games like Divinity II don't catch on. All these great ideas have been piled onto shaky ground; if you can't get the basics right, no number of good ideas will lift your game from the abyss.
This isn't to say I don't like Divinity 2; I actually do, though it goes out of its way to make you dislike it. It's like your bad-girl crush--she'll curse and insult you, but you remain starry eyed because you see the wonderful qualities lingering deep inside.
Divinity II is no Divine Divinity, though. Even compared to its modern-day brethren, like Dragon Age and even Drakensang and Risen, Divinity II comes up short. So much potential has been lost because the basics--the difficulty curve, the map interface, the AI, pathfinding--weren't delivered. A patch can help, but the very core is too flawed to make this a legitimately great game. Fair effort here, and I wish you the best of luck with Divinity III.
